


We hold each other up

by childoffantasy



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alcohol, Bars and Pubs, Dialogue Heavy, Female Friendship, Gen, I'd rather over warn than under warn, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Post-Promised Day, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 03:39:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17480438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/childoffantasy/pseuds/childoffantasy
Summary: There are days when a chance to get out of the office and to meet and spend an hour or two decompressing with a friend is the best thing in the world.Takes place about 6 months after the Promised Day. Riza Hawkeye and Rebecca Catalina have an enduring friendship.





	We hold each other up

**Author's Note:**

  * For [storyranger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/storyranger/gifts).



> So the working title for this was Female Friendships in Male Dominated Workspaces cause I had some thematic plan when I started writing and then I promptly forgot what it was, but I think this is pretty representational given my experience of a male-dominated university program. Also there's really nowhere near enough fics for this particular female friendship and I gotta help change that.
> 
> Most of the really heavy stuff in the tags is like a mention at best, if anyone is concerned feel free to ask me, but I figured it was better to over-tag than to under-tag and risk it. Also there is precisely one swear word so I figured a general audiences rating was okay but if someone disagrees lmk and I'm happy to bump it up.
> 
> Also I'm really delighted to get this done and posted cause originally it was supposed to be a Christmas present for Storyranger and then neither of us got our fics done on time. This is the longest completed fic I've ever posted in my life by a factor of like 2 so let's keep this trend going??

Rebecca thanked the bartender and picked up the two pints in front of her. As she turned around and scanned the room for a table, she saw Riza standing by the door doing the same. Riza spotted Rebecca by the bar and tilted her head towards a couple of empty seats against the wall before beginning to move across the room.

The pub was fairly well populated for a Thursday night, full of the dull roar of several dozen conversations, but the seats Riza had pointed out were inside a little booth that muted some of the noise. Rebecca reached the table first, and slid into the seat nearest the door, knowing how uncomfortable Riza got if she couldn’t keep an eye on who was entering an establishment. A moment later Riza set her purse on the bench opposite her friend, before sitting and gratefully taking the glass Rebecca offered.

“Please tell me you’ve had a quieter week than I have,” asked Rebecca with a sigh. “God knows I need a night off.”

“Besides the normal office fires, you mean?” Riza grinned.

“That was bad, and you should be ashamed that you treat _me_ this way but not your boys in the office,” Rebecca glared over the rim of her pint glass, “however if you’re making puns about General Sparky that means I get dibs on grousing.”

Riza waved a hand magnanimously, inviting her friend to continue.

“Mostly I’m just tired, we’ve been run off our feet in old man Grumman’s office considering we’re still cleaning up the treaties with both Aerugo and Drachma. And if running back and forth talking with diplomats and wrangling telegrams and phones wasn’t enough, just today Grumman suggested marrying me off to the Aerugonian ambassador! As if he doesn’t want to keep me as his attaché badly enough that he moved me halfway across the damned country!”

Rebecca broke off and took a deep breath before raising her glass to her lips. Riza looked at her sympathetically and asked, “Do you want me to grab a drinks menu? I can get you something stronger than beer.”

“No,” Rebecca sighed, despondent, “I have to be back at it again appallingly early tomorrow. I thought our military was bad, the Drachman delegation are, to a man, the sort to get up before dawn for calisthenics or whatever and they always want to get started first thing. I’m pretty sure they’d work through weekends if Grumman didn’t insist they get the tourist experience while they’re here.”

“Trying to convince them we have some worthwhile culture can’t be a bad thing,” said Riza, “especially if it means you get to stick to a five-day work week.”

“True, and I got off at a reasonable time today, which is how I managed to make it here tonight,” Rebecca said, her mood lifting slightly. “Anyway, tell me about the latest from the hot seat!”

“Well first of all you’re not allowed to use that joke anymore, it’s too old,” Riza said, causing Rebecca to pout exaggeratedly. “But it really has been fairly quiet, we’re mostly tying up the last couple loose ends from our last inspection of the folks stationed Ishval and getting all the reports and analyses put together for whenever the Führer gets freed up from this latest round of treaty diplomacy. Why, I even let the Brigadier General nap for a whole 30 minutes undisturbed this afternoon!”

The two women broke into giggles at the ongoing ridiculousness of Mustang’s sleep schedule, but as they calmed Rebecca eyed her friend closely.

“How about you, have you been catching up on some sleep too?”

Riza sighed, and briefly rubbed a hand over her face before nodding.

“Some, at least. I’m not entirely sure being back in Central helps, But at least my apartment is a little cozier than the tents they call barracks out in the desert.”

Rebecca grimaced, recalling with no great fondness the periodic field exercises all personnel had to participate in. Furthermore, she knew from long years of friendship that “cozy” was not how most would describe Riza’s rather spartan apartment. On the other hand, the space was significantly more defensible than a tent in the middle of sparsely populated desert, no matter how many other military officers one was sharing quarters with.

After a moment, Riza spoke again.

“You know, even five years ago coming home from the desert to an apartment in Central city would have been like lifting a thousand pounds off my shoulders.” She fidgeted with her half full glass and scanned the room. “I don’t know how much anyone told you about the creatures that masterminded this whole show?”

“I’ve gotten a lot of it from Grumman, in bits and pieces. There were 7 of them and their creator? Bradley was one, and I know Jean dated another one of them briefly, before the bitch skewered him.”

Riza smiled tightly at the memory of her coworker’s blessedly temporary paralysis. “Yes, Bradley. They called him Wrath; that one is a bit of an open secret. The one that really got covered up was the one they called Pride, and I won’t go into too many details,”(where anyone could be listening, Rebecca heard the unspoken qualifier,) “but that one managed to somehow literally emerge from the shadows and show its face places it had no rational way of being.”

Riza visibly shuddered at the memory, clutching at her glass as Rebecca looked on in concern, before continuing her train of thought.

“I frankly don’t even have the words to describe how this Pride creature moved and behaved, but it was the most disconcerting being I have ever encountered in my life and all the time I was under Bradley’s thumb I never quite shook the feeling that that thing had its eyes or ears on me at all times of the day or night.”

She broke off and took a large mouthful of her drink.

The thing about Riza, Rebecca knew, was that she had a hard time saying things directly if it were any more personal than a preference for lunch, and there were days when even that was beyond her. Riza had been speaking in codes long before she got caught up in Roy Mustang’s ambitions and insurrections. From what Rebecca understood, Riza’s father had been what some might generously call a _difficult_ man. She knew that Berthold Hawkeye had been a skilled alchemist and researcher, who had very little time, energy, emotional availability to give to his daughter. Rebecca was entirely aware that after 8 years she still didn’t have the whole picture of Riza’s life before she came to the Amestrian military, although by Rebecca’s reckoning the Hawkeye household had spent many years being abusive in ways that generally weren’t physical, even if Riza would never describe it as such.

What that meant in the military was that Riza took to Roy’s codes as though avoiding treasonous language was something she was born to do. As far as Rebecca was concerned, Riza had learned slowly and gradually to tell Rebecca a bit of what was going on in her head so as to not simply break down (something that had happened before, and which Rebecca really rather preferred to avoid – the fallout was never fun for anyone).

In turn, Rebecca had learned over time how to intuit the things Riza very carefully avoided saying out loud. Riza was trying to communicate that she couldn’t quite shake the specter of the homunculus called Pride, and most likely she had not yet come out of the perpetual crisis mode she had fallen into while serving as Bradley’s personal aide. Rebecca also suspected these two things were related.

Having pity on Riza, considering the amount of sharing that had just occurred beneath the surface, Rebecca figured it was time to step in.

“I don’t know if cozy is the way I’d describe your shoebox apartment in this weather,” Rebecca teased gently, lightening the mood. “I really think you need a few more afghans or something for that, maybe you could sweet talk Fürer Grumman into teaching you how to knit?”

Riza gave her friend a small, thankful smile. “I’m sure I could, though I don’t need to, I already know how.”

“Wait, you do?” asked Rebecca, taken aback. “How am I only just learning this about you?”

“Well, I was a small-town girl,” offered Riza, “I tend to assume everyone knows how. You have to spend the winter doing something to keep warm, after all!”

“That settles it,” Rebecca said, “next week we’re going to drink wine at your place and you can teach me how to knit you an afghan because I am sick of freezing every time I come over.” With that Rebecca drained her pint and squinted at the empty glass.

Riza looked at her own glass, which only held a few remaining mouthfuls of rapidly warming beer. “Do you think you’ll be free enough this time next week?”

“I should hope so, the Drachmans are supposed to leave next Wednesday and the Aerugonians arrive the Monday after that, so as long as I can stay on top of preparations for the new delegation, I should be able to leave on time on Thursday,” Rebecca waved her crossed fingers around as she spoke.

Riza nodded and downed the last bit of her drink. “Good luck with them.”

“I really think it’s going well,” Rebecca said, “the personalities are so much easier to manage when we don’t have all those corrupt generals turning every closed-door meeting into a pissing contest. The only problem is that we have to rework basically all the treaties from scratch.”

“And that takes time,” supplied Riza, while Rebecca nodded tiredly.

The two women stood up and moved towards the door of the bar and out into the night.          

“Are you going straight home?” asked Riza once they were outside.

“Yeah,” said Rebecca, “I have to hit the sack so when they decide I need to join Drachman calisthenics I’ll at least have had my beauty sleep.”

Riza snorted at the thought and said “I need to stop by the shop, I used the last of my butter and milk making dinner and I won’t have time tomorrow, so I’ll walk with you as far as Broadway?”

Rebecca smiled over at the Hawk’s Eyes and nodded, as she began walking with her best friend into the dark of the evening.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on Tumblr, Pillowfort, and have a Twitter I never check - I'm childoffantasy all those places.


End file.
